Of course I did. Most serious gamers, at some point in their lives, get the design bug. They may fiddle with character sheets, house rules, and the like, but eventually, most gamers get the itch to build something from the ground up.
My own system was finagled between 1997-98, and involved character stats and skills rated from 1-20. Difficulty was expressed as a number of d6s, and you wanted to roll under your rating. In those late 2E days, wanting to roll low on a huge pile of dice was novel enough that my gaming buddies found it exotic. I did initiative as a bidding process... If you volunteered to go later in the round, you got bonuses on your actions (because you were assumed were able to take the best advantage of changing situations).
The first game was about a group of bounty hunters in the modern (sic) day. Bounty hunters in the late 90's trying to track down a serial killer, they discover that he's actually a necromancer as they close in on him. We then had a zombie apocalypse thing, then a fantasy deal set in the Arthurian legends.
I finally reached a point where I realized the compelling part of my games were the characters and the narratives rather than the rules set. I got into a LARP phase with a vampire game, eventually got back into D&D, and never looked back.
It does seem like many gaming groups have an aspiring game designer that wants to make their own RPG. Typically, they are making a mod of their preferred gaming system but trying to "fix" everything they perceive to be wrong with it. Such tinkering might be exploited for house rules, but I rarely see any such tinkerers produce a complete document.
My own system was finagled between 1997-98, and involved character stats and skills rated from 1-20. Difficulty was expressed as a number of d6s, and you wanted to roll under your rating. In those late 2E days, wanting to roll low on a huge pile of dice was novel enough that my gaming buddies found it exotic. I did initiative as a bidding process... If you volunteered to go later in the round, you got bonuses on your actions (because you were assumed were able to take the best advantage of changing situations).
The first game was about a group of bounty hunters in the modern (sic) day. Bounty hunters in the late 90's trying to track down a serial killer, they discover that he's actually a necromancer as they close in on him. We then had a zombie apocalypse thing, then a fantasy deal set in the Arthurian legends.
I finally reached a point where I realized the compelling part of my games were the characters and the narratives rather than the rules set. I got into a LARP phase with a vampire game, eventually got back into D&D, and never looked back.
It does seem like many gaming groups have an aspiring game designer that wants to make their own RPG. Typically, they are making a mod of their preferred gaming system but trying to "fix" everything they perceive to be wrong with it. Such tinkering might be exploited for house rules, but I rarely see any such tinkerers produce a complete document.
) during the dark days of 2e. It went through two versions. The first version was skill based and had The Grand Differential Table (tm) (resisted rolls - the difference impacted the results) and the Continuous Action System (tm). It lead to wonderful spells like Vacuum Lung Death (tm). It died under the weight of rules bloat.
I consider their system the 4th edition of what we were trying to do all along.
